


Mind Your Manners

by lantadyme



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-30
Updated: 2011-01-30
Packaged: 2017-10-15 06:11:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/157818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lantadyme/pseuds/lantadyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first color Terezi tastes is red.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mind Your Manners

She wakes up for the first time with her eyes burned black on the inside, black as high midnight, and for a second Terezi wonders where all the light has gone.

She can't see. There's simply nothing.

Then the pain hits, crippling and throbbing like hot darts plunged into her eyes sockets, like the bite of a terrible featherscaled venombeast injected directly into her forebrain, and then she sees more than just black. Then she sees flashes of colors she's never witnessed before, each one pounding in agonizing time with the toxic pain spreading through her face and each torturous heartbeat.

It's agony. It hurts hurts _hurts_ and she screams in the silence of the forest, an ugly hopeless hateful lilting that echoes and echoes and Terezi knows she's gone. She's finished. There's no way she can keep up with Vriska like this. Deep down inside she doesn't even know how she got out here, out of her hive and into the forest, but she blames Vriska all the same.

Seems like a safe bet.

The pain is stomach-turning but somehow she makes it back to her hive. Somehow, pawing through the forest on her hands and knees, headbutting trees in her blind scramble through the darkness. She can't see anything but she can smell the leaves, the mushrooms, and she can hear the animals watching her—watching and waiting with all their teeth and strength and power against one lone, blind, abandoned troll child. She can't help but imagine teal blood on their mouths and the pop and snap of rending bone.

Terrified and stumbling, her heart beats faster and that makes her eyes pound with shining sparks of red-hot agony. Terezi is still sobbing to herself as she finally finds the rungs of the ladder that leads up to her home, her fingers locking around the wood as if she plans to never let go. She fumbles upward, her whole body trembling with the fear and the pain, and once she's inside she slams the hatch shut; sits on it and locks it and sobs into her hands. Safe. She's safe. But she's still finished.

She collapses there on top of her entrance hatch, on her back and facing upward, staring blind at the ceiling and her eyes won't stop watering. They ache and she wants to wipe at them, but even blinking is agony right now.

What happened? _What happened?_

All she can remember is spinning justice on Vriska. She'd gone to bed and then there had been dreams of yellow, but after that, what? What?

She can't remember.

The sobs hitch in her chest. Terezi trembles on the floor in the middle of her hive, curling up around herself, and somehow she falls asleep.

For nights she roams her hive blind and alone, her hands smudging along every surface and her shins picking up bruise after bruise. Her skin must be black and teal, ugly clouds of off-yellow and off-blue thrown in for good measure. The bruises hurt, but not nearly as much as her eyes do. They burn like fire and they never stop running. Every time she wakes up she's dehydrated and her clothes are soaked with tears.

She eats whatever she has in her storage room and some things that aren't. Some things that she knows are insane to eat but she chews on the chalk all the same, relishing the texture of it. She knows that once she runs out of food she's in trouble. It scares her, but not nearly as much as brutal animal mauling does, and she's safe inside. She would ask for help but without sight her computer is all tapping keys and warm monitor; she can only put nonsense in and get nothing out.

She sits on the floor in the middle of her room and hugs her scalemates, and with her mouth curled into a frown she whispers to them that she's a little afraid. She's never really thought about the culling before but is this how it feels when you sit waiting, knowing that they're coming for you and not able to do anything about it?

Maybe if she had an active lusus and not just the promise of a lusus, things would be different. Maybe. But she's utterly alone now, no one to take care of her as she adapts to this debilitating roll of the dice.

The scale is not tipped in her favor, not at all. A quiet black rage builds up underneath the fear—because she knows this is all Vriska's fault and how is it fair that Terezi herself won't get to be the one to stab that huge betraying bitch through her blue bloodpump and watch her die?

It's after a week and a half, a long ten nights of blind, painful roaming, that she finally crawls into her recuperacoon, buries her head under the ugly slime, and opens her eyes.

It's stings like seven kinds of hell and a painful moan slips out of her mouth, the bubbles tickling their way past her face, but after a solid minute the aching starts to ease and that alone is enough to make Terezi want to cry all over again. Except with relief this time.

That day when she dreams, something whispers to her in colors and smells and tastes, and she doesn't understand a single word but she trusts it because it makes her feel safe. It makes her believe she's not doomed. She wakes with a start and a smile on her face and even the dull pain behind her eyes can't ruin that night. The next day and the next she hears the same whispers, the whispers she can't understand, and she walks through a dream-city blind with the voice guiding her. She doesn't understand and she still bangs herself up from head to toe, but she's getting better. She doesn't trip as often.

She wakes up hungry, her hands shaking from low blood sugar, and she shuffles through her hive slowly, hands on the walls and leaving trails of slime in their wake. She finds her storage room and she knows how empty it is by the echoes. There's not much food left and when she runs out of things to eat, then what? Rationing only gets her so far and she can't live on air. Learning to walk in her dreams isn't going nearly fast enough and a troll who can't be self-sufficient is as good as a corpse—starved and desiccated in the middle of her abandoned hive.

Terezi chews on dried meat and insects and then goes back to her room, sitting in the middle of the floor again and smelling. Licking her toys. Trying to recreate the tastes and smells that guide her in her dreams.

A mutinous part of her thinks that maybe the sun didn't just burn out her eyes, but maybe part of her brain too. How crazy can this possibly look? Licking her toys and wandering blind and giggling through her home?

Trusting a dream enough to balance her entire _existence_ against it?

But Terezi knows it's utterly and completely real. It's the ultimate truth. She has nothing else to fall back on, and although she doesn't have a lusus, she believes that this dream can get her back on her feet again. So she licks her scalemates' eyes and angrily sinks her fangs into their plush bellies when she tastes nothing more than boring plastic.

"T-thee?"

The voice starts her out of a dream. Terezi sits partially awake on her floor, still tasting dream flavors and covered in half-dried sopor slime. She must look like a madwoman. She listens hard and takes shallow breaths, and then it comes again. So she hadn't just imagined it.

"T-thee, are you up there?"

"Hello?" she whispers, and even her voice sounds strangled. She remembers that lisp but what was his name? They'd worked together recently through Trollian but she'd only met him in person two or three times, and then only by tangent through Aradia. Something with a lot of S's in it, which she'd always found slightly funny.

"Sollux?"

"T-thee, could you fucking anthwer me if you're even thtill alive up there?" He mutters something to himself afterward and with that Terezi knows it's him.

"Sollux!" she yells this time, standing slowly and shakily with her hands spread out. Her balance is getting better but she's not one hundred percent stable yet. She wanders slowly over to her window and paws at the locks to get them open, then strains the window itself open afterward. "Sollux!"

"Shit, you _are_ alive," he calls back from somewhere on the other side of the hive. He sounds a little surprised. He'd probably expected her to open the hatch and let him inside since that would be the sane thing to do. But Terezi doesn't exactly feel sane right now. She still feels paranoid of cullers and other monsters and she's not letting anyone in except maybe Karkat.

"Oh my god, what the hell happened to you?" Sollux says, suddenly just yards from her face.

Terezi yelps, arms coming up to protect herself as she flinches backward. How did he get up here so fast? How did he—? She's sitting on her rear on the floor once she remembers that he's psionic or something and that he can levitate. "Stay away," she says, her voice surprisingly calm. Her heart is hammering in her chest and it makes her eyes pound. She closes them and drags a hand through her slime-encrusted hair.

"Thorry, thorry," he mutters, trying to soothe her and not any closer than the last time he spoke. "I'm not—" He breaks off, and when he speaks again his voice drips with guilt and self-loathing. "I'm not going to hurt you."

Terezi feels a little stab of guilt herself. The last thing he needs is to be reminded that the last girl he visited ended up eye-blasted into the other side of oblivion.

"I know. Sorry, guess I'm a little paranoid right now." She sighs and faces him again, and as she gets to her feet slowly she opens her eyes.

"Holy shit," he whispers.

Terezi makes herself grin, feels it pulling at her face. Yes, look at her burned out eyes. They must look impressive from the outside. "So I'm going to take a shot in the dark and guess that Vriska isn't as dead as I'd planned?"

He doesn't say anything at first and when he does he's a little closer than before. Not much but enough to get a better look at her eyes. "I haven't been thitting around thtaring at my computer really. No gloating though. I think she'th gone thilent."

"Damn it." Angry, her jaw sets into an ugly frown and she slams a fist against the windowsill. She'd played her white-text-guy card and somehow Vriska managed to have something in her hand to counter that? Terezi hopes she's at least super maimed. Something worse by far than the stinging pain behind her own eyes.

"You dropped off the map right after she did," he says, again a little closer. "I kept waiting for you to methage me or thomething conthidering I helped you out with the planning on that thing. I wath kind of pithed at firtht, but after a week I jutht got worried."

"Worried about me?" She doesn't even know him that well.

"Aradia wanted revenge. Now she'th dead," he says, his voice quiet and not thrilled to be talking about that, but doing it anyway. "I had to know if I'd ended up killing you too."

"C'mon, like I'm going to blame you for this," Terezi says, motioning at her eyes. "We both know it was her."

"Yeah, probably. Thtill doethn't change that you both have uthed me ath a fucking pawn in your thtupid revenge planth. I should jutht go hole up in my shithive rethpiteblock and wait around for everyone I know to go off the deep end or die horribly."

Oh, so he's in one of his bad moods today? "I didn't use you. I asked for your help and you volunteered."

"Look, can I come in? Thethe treeth are giving me the creepth out here."

That makes Terezi pause. Her hands curl into fists on the windowsill but she understands where he's coming from. It wasn't that long ago that she was exposed and terrified of monsters lurking in the dark. The trees are full of animals and a troll from the city like Sollux probably isn’t used to it. "Yeah, that's fine," she says, stepping to the side and waving him in the open window.

"Shit, your eyes. That lookth really painful," he whispers once he's inside, and Terezi ignores him long enough to shut the window after him. "Can you thee anything?"

"Nope. Not a thing. It's as dark as a deathcave in an eclipse."

"Gueth that explainth why you look like a thopor-thlime addict."

Terezi reaches out and bats at him, following his voice, and grins as she actually connects with the back of his head. "You are such a jerk. I don't know why Aradia even liked you."

He doesn't say anything for a long moment and Terezi winces a little.

"Sorry."

"Whatever," he mutters back, his voice dejected.

"You haven't heard anything from her?"

"Shit, T-Thee, I wath there. I blathted her entire houthe into a crater. Her blood wath all over my clotheth. Aradia'th dead."

She'd read his messages when it had first happened, watching his text fall apart into a red-and-blue nightmare of twos and hate speech everywhere. The grammar hadn't even been recognizable through the dualities and she still isn't entirely sure of what happened back when he came out of the mind honey stupor. Hearing him say it now though, hearing how hushed and broken his voice is, resigned and guilty and angry, she gets a little of how it's been eating at him.

A guy like Sollux hoards up these kinds of emotions and lets them stew until all that's left is poison, and what he doesn't use on cussing out other people and hating himself sits in a hollow deep inside and never goes away.

Terezi doesn't really understand that. When she hates, she hates openly and completely, and she works toward a goal to tip the scales back to level ground, whether through apology or bitter revenge. She knows that quality in herself is what drew her to Vriska in the first place. The girl had been dealt an ugly hand with her lusus and Terezi has always been fond of a challenge—how to balance something like that out.

It had been different when they were just random trolls no one cared about. Playing games and helping her friend had been fun. It hadn't mattered then. Somewhere along the lines though, Vriska had gone off the deep end and stabbed her in the back; stabbed everyone in the back. Now Tavros is crippled and Aradia's dead and it's all gone to hell, and Terezi hasn't only failed one friend, but two more plus herself.

Sollux is obviously hurting, and she's not the best person for this but she isn't about to just leave him to cry alone in his hive forever.

"Hey, are you okay?"

"Jutht peachy."

"I'm serious. Talk to me, smart guy. That's why you came over here, right?"

"I came over to find your corpthe because I wath sure Therket had killed you too." A pause as he finds his honesty. "And maybe, I dunno, root through your thtuff afterward. I could alwayth uthe another computer."

She has to laugh at that. And it feels good to laugh again, although strange on her face. It's been a while since she did more than squint at things and try to make herself understand her new dark world. "I bet my screen is all covered in ugly yellow two text, huh?"

"You got thome from KK too, and I don't know who thith green one ith with all the athterikth." She hears him pull out the chair to her computer and sit down. "Thome roleplay shit?"

"Yeah, something like that."

"Lookth thtupid."

"Hey, quit snooping. Just because I can't see that stuff anymore doesn't mean it's not private." Terezi steps over her floor and goes to grab the back of her computer chair. She gets his shoulder instead and for a second neither of them moves.

Sollux pushes the chair back into the middle of the room, pulling away from Terezi's hand. "Thorry."

Seems like they're just going back and forth with the apologies tonight.

"It's okay."

A long silence hangs for a while, Sollux not talking and Terezi not sure what to say. He'd come to check on her and that's a little flattering; that he had cared that much, even if it was mostly for his own conscience. She's tired, though—tired of trying to teach herself to see with these new weird senses and of constantly failing. She's tired and hungry and still a little scared, and it's long past beginning to wear on her. She feels her posture sagging. She leans back and sits against the edge of her computer desk, blind eyes dipping closed at the sudden exhaustion.

"I know I've been asking you a lot of favors lately, but I need some help."

"I can probably thet up a thcreenreader. I don't have the equipment but I can find thome thtuff for you."

Terezi's eyes pop open again and despite the pain that causes, she just stares at him. "What?"

"Tho you can read chat. And other thingth I gueth." He says it like she's crazy, and she feels a little crazy for not having thought of that sooner. "That'th what you were athking, right?"

She laughs again, and it bubbles out in an insane giggle instead of the chuckle she'd been intending. "No, actually. I was going to ask if you could get me some food," she says, grinning wide. "I'm about three nights from starving!"

Sollux' freaky mutant brain must screech to a shuddering halt at her manic display. For a while he says nothing, and when he finally gets some words in his mouth they only translate to sputtering sounds.

"What the fuck are you talking about? You live in a foretht like thith and your luthuth can't find you food? I thought mine was a gigantic idiot, but I gueth I wath wrong. You win the gold thtar."

"No, stupid! I don't have a lusus."

"How can you not have a luthuth? You'd have been culled or eaten by now."

Terezi grins again. "I know! I'm just that good."

It's more than that. It's the creatures her lusus sent to bring her up out of the trial caves when she was tiny. The mental nudge that had suggested she build her hive in a tree for safety instead of a lawnring. All the times she had somehow stumbled along sustenance while out in the forest looking for food; and even now she's sure her lusus has been in her life, guiding her—just never as an active partner like most troll children experience. That had never been a problem for Terezi until now.

Blind like this, she doesn't know how she can survive without help. She needs time to learn how to see with the tastes and colors and smells, and now her hands are shaking again from lack of food. The Cheshire grin slides from her lips and she probably looks pitiful like this, trembling and blind and half-starved skinny. She faces Sollux and she sniffs, and it doesn't paint a picture in her mind like in her dreams, but she does taste a hint that he will help.

"You're going to owe me," he says, his voice barely a whisper. Terezi owing him a favor could come in very handy, and her fondness of balance guarantees she'll follow through on it.

"That's fine by me," she breathes, her limbs heavy. "The green text girl, arsenicCatnip. Can you message her later and tell her I'm cashing in my favor and I need her to bring me some fresh kills? Say her beloved Dragonyy'yd tyrant demands it."

"Dragonyy'yd?"

"Just say it. She'll run you around in circles otherwise."

"She'th not going to try to roleplay shit with me, ith she?"

"She might, I don't know. Just tell her to knock it off and she usually listens." Terezi shrugs, suddenly a little dizzy as her blood sugar tumbles. "I can owe you for the screenreader in the mean time, too. Sound good?"

He hesitates for a moment but he responds soon enough. "Sure."

With that one word the energy seeps out of her. Her legs collapse and she sinks to the floor, sitting in a pile of food wrappings and eviscerated toys and leaning hard against the leg of her computer desk as her head spins. This is part of the reason she's been spending so much time sleeping lately, this embarrassing collapsing thing. Sollux jumps to his feet and crouches down next to her, his hands gripping her shoulders and the scent of his clean clothes in her nose.

"Are you okay?"

"Little dizzy," she whispers through a half-smile. He's so close now she can smell his grey skin. He smells like ozone and sour honey and she can taste the difference between him and the rest of her room. She's been sniffing these rooms for days and suddenly he's here in stark contrast to everything she's grown so used to. A vague picture forms in her mind—a chalky blotch of mustard-on-teal—and that simple sensation is enough to make her heart soar.

She sees it. The visualization is there.

Terezi balls a fist in the neck of his shirt and hauls him closer until their faces are only a breath apart. Sollux struggles in surprise, sputtering his butchered S's, and she grins all the wider as she drags her tongue slowly across one smooth lens of his glasses.

"Holy shit, what the fuck is wrong with you?!" he yells, flailing out of her grasp and scrabbling backward.

But Terezi doesn't care, too busy laughing to herself with the delicious taste of candy red apples exploding in her mouth.


End file.
